How one man went from working a soul-sucking 9-5 to earning $10,000 a month online

In 2008, Johnny FD was 27
years old and living in California, earning about $50,000 a year
working in business-to-business sales.

"The highlight of my day was driving to and from work, just
because those were the moments I had an excuse to listen to music
and not think about how little my life was going anywhere," he
remembers. "It wasn't even that I was unhappy. I was just so
unmotivated."

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When the company he worked for was sold later that year, he was
offered a choice: stick with his position, or take a stipend and
be laid off. He chose to go.

After spending a few months blowing through his savings with
friends in Los Angeles ("I'm lucky I got out without too much
debt - my friends all have $20,000 of credit-card bills they're
still trying to pay off"), he turned his sights on somewhere a
little farther from home: Thailand.

"When people travel, and they go to another country, it's always
mixed," he says. "They say it was fun or good, but Thailand was
that place that no matter who came back, they said it was the
most incredible trip of their life. Everyone talked about it like
this paradise."

In his first seven days, he took seven different tours. The last
one was scuba diving, and he was so thrilled with the experience
that he spent the next few years going from zero dives to nearly
1,000, traveling the world teaching diving and searching for the
perfect place.

Until he decided that wasn't enough. "I realized I no longer
wanted to be the dive guy working at the resort," he says. "I
wanted to be the guest. I told myself I didn't want to dive again
until I could afford to be a guest."

To get some cash and free gym time, he tried something new: Muay
Thai, a fighting style practiced in Southeast Asia. "I was
turning 30 and thought if I don't try it now, I never will," FD
(the surname he uses professionally) remembers.

caption

FD during a day of scuba diving with his girlfriend, Larissa, in Koh Lanta, Thailand.

Two years of
fighting led to a revelation. "It was after my sixth pro fight,"
he says. "I was beat up. I had broken a foot. I had a swollen
eye. My body was destroyed. I was turning 32 and realized my body
wasn't going to be able to do this much longer."

He had been keeping a blog about his experience with Muay Thai,
and he'd heard that people could make money turning their blogs
into ebooks, so he decided to give it a shot. He repackaged his
blog into "12 Weeks
in Thailand: The Good Life on the Cheap," which made $600 in
its first month on sale.

"After I wrote that book, I wanted to find out how to sell more,"
he says. "I started meeting all these people doing internet
marketing that happened to be traveling or living in Chiang Mai.
I had no idea there was this underground community of digital
nomads. It was kind of just emerging, and I would meet whoever I
could and ask if I could take them to dinner or coffee and pick
their brain."

FD stumbled across dropshipping, a business where you serve as a
go-between for customers who want to order products online, like
a smaller-scale Overstock or Wayfair. After taking a course to learn the
basics, he set up a dropshipping business from Chiang Mai
that became a main source of income.

He explains that he runs his businesses in two modes: growth,
where he puts in 40-50 hours a week to finish new projects and
pursue new opportunities, and maintenance, where he spends 4-10
hours a week simply maintaining the framework he's already
established. For the last six months, he's been in maintenance
mode.

While his income varies, he generally brings home about
$10,000 a month, and details his exact earnings throughmonthly
income reportspublished on his site.

"If I was making this much in California, I would feel like I had
to watch my budget, but here my expenses are less than $1,500 a
month, which means I have $9,000 or $8,000 to save, or if I want
something or to go somewhere, I really don't think about it," he
explains.

He says that there are two ways for people to create a similar
lifestyle: "You can do what I did and quit and go live off
savings until you figure it out, or, if you want to preplan,
follow someone else's success."